I felt like working in a niche until November 2011. I did not believe there was anyone else beyond me in my local area who's seriously using Drupal. But — it was on my walk to the grocery store when two strangers suddenly crossed the street, bumped into me and said "Dude, are you sun from drupal.org?"

How wrong I was. I started my local user group shortly after, in November 2011. Out of fucking nowhere, 12+ people attended the first meeting! With a huge interest in Drupal and fostering a local user group.

Meanwhile, the Drupal User Group Karlsruhe is close to its 1st anniversary. And, we've adopted the DrupalCon spirit recently: We are meeting once a month. We're meeting in a different location each time. The location is different, just like our members are. We want to learn about new things. And the location shouldn't be excluded.

We want to share and exchange knowledge, about Drupal and the world. But how?

We want Drupal 8 to make a big difference and be a leading web platform. But in all seriousness, we didn't make much progress yet. More than 60% of all changes were actually bug fixes for Drupal 7. 41 weeks are remaining. In merely two weeks from now, we're down to 39.

Some core initiatives made some good pragmatic progress, but there are almost no major architectural changes yet. A few initiatives are completely stuck, due to a lack of understanding, communication, and scope resolution, and lastly, due to not being able to get everyone on the same page. We want to achieve some serious progress over the next 9 months, so we need to get our act together.

Last weekend, 14 core contributors met in Boston in order to resolve the conflicts and unblock the initiatives. This post attempts to explain

There's multi-purpose, single-purpose, and non-purpose; the latter being Drupal core.

The Drupal project struggled for years to agree on a use-case for a concrete product to build with and in the community.

Drupal can be used in many different ways. And everyone agrees that Drupal core must not prioritize one way over any other. But at the same time, we present Drupal core to newcomers and evaluators; a poor and pointless application that doesn’t do or solve anything. This time is over.

There have been recent discussions about the maintainability and sustainability of Drupal core. They highlighted a significant lack in the number of skilled Drupal contributors. So the question is: how can we improve the quality of contributions and increase the quantity of skilled contributors?

I want to be honest. I expected and feared a lot of backslash, disagreements, and even name-calling on my Drupal Crisis blog post. But to my surprise, almost everyone who provided feedback mostly agreed with most issues raised, and even more so on the overall problem space at glance.